Elsewhere: Sense8 and Humanity in Storytelling

Over at the Something Different blog, I finally found an excuse to talk about Sense8 – because I’ve been waiting quite a while to try and dig through my feelings on the show. Turns out, I liked it.

The show is about eight people, coming from vastly different circumstances, learning that they might be quite a bit different from other humans in a very significant way. Working with that basic concept, there’s a shadowy organization that seems bent on tracking down and eliminating this “other” for whatever reason. Those are the broad strokes. The fine detail comes when the show dips into the lives of these characters, and pulls out some wonderful stories. I will note: the show doesn’t invent the wheel by any stretch of the imagination. All eight stories are filled to the brim with story progressions that you expect to find in each style of story being told. A thief pulls a big score and ends up having to settle a perceived debt. A cop attempts to take the law into his own hands and finds himself pushing up against the organization that has defined his life. A safe romance becomes boring, and a new, exciting prospect seems promising, but a little scary – and so forth. But what the show lacks in raw originality, it makes up for by being one of the most humane look at life that has appeared in almost any form of media in years.